How good is Latvian speech recognition
Latvian is a smaller language for speech recognition, and the model has seen far less of it than English or German. Treat the result as a draft and plan a full review, with extra care for names, places and technical terms.
Clear audio makes a large difference. One speaker close to the microphone, such as a lecture, a radio-style interview or someone dictating notes, gives a draft you can edit quickly. Kitchen-table conversations, phone calls on speaker and noisy events give much weaker text. There the timestamps mainly help you jump to the right moment while you type.
Even a rough draft saves time. Play the file, follow the highlighted line, click any line to hear it again and correct it in place. Have anything you plan to publish checked by a Latvian speaker.
Latvian diacritics in the transcript
Latvian marks long vowels with a macron and softened consonants with a cedilla. These marks change meaning, and they are where most corrections happen.
- Long vowels ā, ē, ī and ū may be written short, or short vowels written long.
- The softened consonants ģ, ķ, ļ and ņ can lose their cedilla and become g, k, l and n.
- Č, š and ž sometimes appear without the háček, mostly in fast speech and names.
- Latvian writes foreign names phonetically with a case ending (Džons, Makdonalds). The model may switch between that and the original spelling.
- Numbers may appear as digits or words. Check dates, which Latvian usually writes as day, month, year or with the year first in formal text.
Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian and auto-detect
Latvian and Lithuanian are related Baltic languages, and auto-detect can confuse them on short clips. A bigger practical issue is Russian: many people in Riga and Latgale switch between Latvian and Russian in the same conversation, and a clip that opens in Russian or English may be labeled as that language for the whole file.
This page preselects Latvian. If the transcript comes back in Russian, Lithuanian or English, check the language setting and run the file again. When a recording is mostly Russian, choose Russian for that file, and expect the Latvian parts to need extra work.
Latgalian, spoken in eastern Latvia, has its own written standard. The model writes it closer to standard Latvian, so Latgalian recordings need careful review.
English mixing and who uploads
Business and tech conversations mix in English terms, which may appear in English spelling or adapted with Latvian endings. If English dominates the file, choose English.
Short WhatsApp voice notes are a special case. A few seconds of audio give auto-detect very little to work with, and a note that starts with "Hi" or "Privet" can be labeled as English or Russian. Keeping Latvian selected avoids that, and you can still check each note quickly against the audio before you copy the text anywhere.
Common uploads include university lectures, research and journalism interviews, municipal meetings, podcasts and church services. The diaspora in the UK, Ireland, Germany and the US sends family recordings: grandparents describing life in Soviet Latvia, song festival memories, and voice notes from relatives.
For subtitles, review the text before exporting SRT or VTT, since each correction carries straight into the caption file.
Formats, exports and translation
Upload MP3, M4A, WAV, WhatsApp voice notes or MP4 and MOV video without converting them first, record in the browser, or import a YouTube link. The transcript arrives in timestamped paragraphs.
Exports to TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT and CSV keep the Latvian letters. For English, open the Google Translate link or use the AI prompt export with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Speaker labels are available on paid plans or with a Minute Pack, and your files are never used to train AI models.